Hell no! This is wrong and hopefully not going to work for SO many reasons, the first being:

"Perry calls this the "moneywall" - it keeps players away from the game and establishes a limit on revenues.Free-to-play lets players spend as much as they want on a game. While some players spend only a few bucks, others spend thousands."

Honestly, who the **** would trust someone who said that? I mean, their main desire is to milk gamers of every bit of money they have to offer.

Secondly, even if I play on servers in my own country in MP atm (and yes, I have decent broadband), I get lag and chop to a certain degree (really noticing in an FPS where the other players can sometimes run at about 5-10fps). That is streaming a lot less than HD video and a signal TWO WAYS. Let me put this forward, a HD video (1080p - what I play on, and I wouldn't go any lower now I've got that on my PC) is about 12-15gb or so right? For 1 hour? So, no big downloads? You'd be using 10gb per HOUR and playing with worse lag than in online MP AND paying subscriptions and using microtransactions, effectively spending on average $300 a month (I think that's the figure). 300x12 = roughly $3.500 per year.

$3.500 per year. Who the hell is going to pay that much? I sure as crap wouldn't, especially not to "Perry" of all people, I'd sooner give my money to hitler. Not to mention using MASSIVE amounts of usage (10gb/hour = probably 40gb per day if you play for 4 hours (avg?) = 14560gb per year, that's 14terrabytes. Do you know how many games you could download for that?

For the same amount of dowload usage you could download 1456 games ever year. So even if you buy 100games per year (online) (a bit much?) this technology is still 14 times more inneficient than the current method.

That is a ridiculously long post so here's the gist if you're lazy (like me)\

* It's evil - all they want is every penny you can give them.* Lag.* 10gb per hour at 1080p.* $3.500 per year? What about "no".* 14560gb per year in usage.* 14 x more inneficient than current model of online purchases.* Microtransactions/subscriptions which >= even a "hardcore PC gamer"/year.

Honestly, this is wrong for SO many reasons, I just hope they don't find a way to get around the obvious technical difficulties and fuck us in the ass once again. "Alarmist" - why yes, that's because it's alarming.

Yeah, I join the choir. While thinking of what the consequences of such a thing would be is quite interesting, it's not going to happen soon, no matter what OnLive says. There just doesn't exist good enough streaming technology. A poster back there gave a lot of details so I won't doubt him.

I do thing that it can happen eventually, since the capacity of broadband and computers increase exponentially, but it's at least, to be very, very optimistic, 25 years from now. If it happens at any moment before 2034 send me a PM and I shall eat my own hat for your amusement.

I'm horrified that this might work. If it does, PC gamers are going to lose what's most important to them: control. As a PC gamer you have power to alter virtually any file in any game and bend the entire game and all of it's mechanics to your whims, you can add any sorts of mods, change any textures or meshes, add your own soundtrack, even tamper with the AI if you know how. If games streaming takes off PC gamers will lose all modding power over their games and be brought down to the level of console gamers, stuck with vanilla releases and not able to even fix bugs.

I'm scared that Games which are infinitely moddable, like Fallout 3, Elder Scrolls, and the Unreal Tournament series, will die.

User made content is what makes the world go 'round these days and if they take that away gaming will become stale fast.

I hope that streaming succeeds, but I already see a major problem with the technology itself. What if my internet connection temporarily goes down? with services like Steam and Xbox Live once I download a game, I can play it without access to the internet, you can't do that with streaming technology, and what if the company you sign up with shuts down their services for maintenance or software updates? Cloud computing could revolutionize gaming, if they can solve those issues and give consumers some insurance that they would still have access to their games even if the company goes out of business.

I'd love to destroy all consoles. Not that I have a grudge about a game the consoles ruined... err maybe I do. Deus Ex 2. It was meant to be the awesomest game ever. Until the filthy console decided to cannabalize off of it. When they made it for the console they dumbed everything down so much the game was like a plain chip, who likes plain chips? I'd prefer a world where the pc could reign unchallanged, better games, better quality, don't get me started on the controls, better product.

I don't think this is going to take off quite like it's being made out to. Given that ISP's are starting to choke the amount of feed you can get from broad band connections (limiting your GB per month and things like that), this doesn't seem to be a great idea. Also, what are they going to do to solve control latency? Lag, a single bad node, the actual limited speed of light... all of these things could cause severe issues in an action game. That's fine for people who want their multiplayer, it comes with the territory. For a single player game, I wouldn't find it acceptable.

This is the pep talk and PR campaigning of a small business taking on big business. Ironically, the big business seems to be the less greedy of the two.

The "moneywall" concept, as I've seen it implemented so far in Korean-based games such as Gunbound and Grand Chase, has been a disgraceful, crude and unsubtle attempt to make money out of virtual items. More to the point, it limits the amount of enthusiasm the sensible gamer will pour into the game if the only way to get certain shiny or high-stat items is to pay real money (which, let's face it, will probably be the case if the free-to-play concept comes to dominate game streaming).

The sick thing about this is that across the Pacific, Western developers have been hard at work trying to stop people from selling their in-game content to each other. Many of us gamers probably thought they were stopping this out of the good of their hearts, so that skill remained the controlling aspect of achievement in gaming. This push for free-to-play just might reveal that in fact, the problem developers have with these exchanges is that it is the consumers profiting from these greedy exchanges, rather than the developers themselves.

The fact of the arts is that old mediums do not "die" when new mediums are created, except when the whole related industry conspires to make it happen. This was true of theatre when film was produced, and for film when video games started their early development. Streaming, as a new way of connecting to software, is not excluded from that rule, and so consoles will survive. To claim otherwise is to make a spurious and risky predictive claim that will prove as stupid as the idea that we were going to have flying cars by the 21st Century.

The only huge difference between streaming and console gaming is not in favour of streaming advocates. The problem is the incapability of the backbones of the Internet to actually deal with the amount of growth it's facing without the addition of something that requires millions of 5 mbps connections for HD input/output visuals. (Keep in mind that HD visuals are exactly what the consumer will expect after using PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s for ten or more years.) There is no way a useful number of people can pay the excessive download and upload fees for an especially powerful connection that, by the way, is not even available in virtually all the nations on Earth.

Streaming won't be massively popular. It won't even reach the city limits. The moment you go rural and get away from those amazing yet unstable cable connections in the United States, you'll find that higher end game streaming will completely stop working. This is a rich man's toy we're talking about, which is probably why OnLive are focusing on free-to-pay games that remove any "moneywall" - the only people who can afford even one of the requirements will have a lot of disposable income anyway.

If game streaming technology ever becomes 500% more sustainable and efficient than it is, then let me know, because only then will it become successful.

The world is not ready for this tecnology, and the business model behind it seems awful. It's not going to work ever, not even in 10 years: by the time the infrastructure becomes suffcient for that kind of traffic, we will have another higher quality video format (UHDV maybe), and at least one new generation of consoles with much more computing power and better graphics.

Silva:The moment you go rural and get away from those amazing yet unstable cable connections in the United States, you'll find that higher end game streaming will completely stop working.

Exactly. And it's very naive of them not to consider the other countries: even if they had servers in Europe, the quality and avalaibility of fast connections is far worse than USA's. If they hope to replace consoles, they would have to do that worldwide, which is many orders of magnitude more impossible than making the service work decently in America alone.

I think the trickiest thing to figure out is the business model. But I'm not a businessman, so I can't contribute any insight.

I do know a lot about tech, though, and it seems that most persons who are skeptical have misconceptions about what would be happening under the hood if this tech actually worked.

(ok, here's the part where I reveal that I've been an IT manager for 8 years but prior to that worked as a game artist, and I teach game art/graphics classes on the side. Oh, and I worked in a graphics research lab for a while too).

First, Streaming HD "video"...

OnLive says it's going to be 720p, not 1080p, which is more than twice as many pixels. They also offer to stream the games at 480p if your 'net connection can't handle the 720p.

But the more important thing to know is that is not streaming video. It's streaming graphics.

Video compression algorithms are very complex. Their job is to take a *flat* moving image and figure out what in there is an object, so to speak, and try to use that to make "layers" so that can further break down the image until it consists of rudimentary moving "parts", the motion of which are easier to describe. Anyhow, to the computer a video clip just looks like a bunch of animated paint smearing around; it cannot see it the way human vision can, which makes its job hard. In essence, the compression algorithm tries to reconstruct "the scene" in a video, because the video was, at one point, actually 3d (if we're talking filming actual reality).

Streaming graphics, on the other hand, is much easier since *you already have all the actual 3d information of what is contained in the image*. 3d games contain real 3d coordinates, and descriptions of how light interacts with the surfaces draped across those points in space.

If you've got that info, you can render frames in your game's engine directly to compressed video, instead of projecting on to a flat image, and then ask a video compression algorithm to "figure out what just happened" in that image compared to the previous one.

So streaming graphics, like streaming video, only sends the changes that occur between the current frame and the last (so entire frames are not sent every 30/sec), but streaming graphics knows exactly what is going to change, whereas streaming video has to make "an educated guess". And when is guesses poorly, you see video compression artifacts like macroblocks, fuzzy edges, degraded quality et al.

In short, much much more efficient, which is why the streaming aspect of OnLive is feasible, in my opinion.

Second, yes the interaction is two-way, whereas passive media is one-way, but it's not symmetric. The amount of data you send is *extremely* small in comparison to what is sent to you. You're only sending controller data (orientation of the analog sticks and button on/off state each frame). That's nothing.

Now to the server aspect of OnLive...

In order for this to work and take the load, not only will they have to have the most cutting-edge virtualization technology *and* clustering technology, they will have to have figure out how to extend such technology (which currently exists and works well and is magical) to the GPU.

Not to go into too much detail about virtualization and clustering, but in essence you can make a bunch of machines act as one machine, or one machine act as multiple machines. You put those together, and you've got a system where the total load of all the games being played can be distributed among all the machines in any combination or slicing you want, and that configuration can be changed in the blink of an eye.

For instance, one of these beefy servers could probably host 10 simultaneous games of Lego BatMan (keep in mind, these server computers are well beyond any desktop PC you could build, which is pricey, but that pays for itself with the load sharing).

This system could also go the other way if someone is playing Crysis, and the demand of the game eclipses the capabilities of one physical server, another server that has 20% of its CPU free (because it's only hosting 8 games of Lego BatMan at the moment) could contribute its last 20% to help render some of the terrain in that game of Crysis.

What if one server is hosting 10 games at once, which is its max load, and the players in 3 of those games all get to the same crazy boss at the same time, which has more complex graphics? Would the server catch on fire? Would it reduce the framerate for everyone else being hosted? Not necessarily.

In a move related to the "over-commit help" scenario I described with Crysis above, the virtualization monitor could move one of the hosted Lego BatMan games from the overloaded server to another, unloaded server within in a split second, without interrupting the action as perceived by the player on the other end. This is known as live migration, and has been around for a while for servers. Can they do it with a game? Perhaps they can with the right support from the GPU manufacturers.

Next up is the problem with hardware getting old and the continuous upgrade problem. This is actually one of the easier things. New servers can be put in every year that have twice the power as the previous ones. You install them ahead of the projected need, and then (because you already have super amazing virtualization & clustering in place), you move all hosted games onto them, seamlessly, then ditch the old servers making room for even more new ones, and so on. Plus, any game popular enough to stick around (like Lego BatMan, for example) will become even less of a burden on the system as time goes on (new servers in the future could host 40 games of Lego BatMan at once).

Finally, latency. Ah yes, this is the biggest *technological* sticking point. If they can't solve this then OnLive won't be worth it. Some games deal with latency well (non-twitch action games, turn-based games, etc). But others demand low-latency. Supposedly you can't tell if the latency is under 30ms, and that latency up to 90ms is "acceptable". I can't really say, it depends I guess.

Regardless, it has to be low and stay low. Obviously there's the argument that commodity internet link speeds (and latency) will continue to improve, which is true, but how fast?

The best thing OnLive can try to do in the short term is try to become an ISP, or at least set up their server farm right next to an ISP. So instead of signing up for Internet service with Comcast or Verizon, you sign up with OnLive, or an OnLive partner. This could spell disaster for ISP's who don't partner with them, if OnLive actually takes off, creating a terrible situation for consumers.

Ok this post was long, but I've been wanting say all that for a while, and so I picked this site it seems to dump out my thoughts.

As for my personal feelings, they're mixed. I would be sad to see the end of hobbiest building monster PC's just to play Crysis, but I think the potential advantages would probably outweigh those feelings in the long run.

Viruzzo:Exactly. And it's very naive of them not to consider the other countries: even if they had servers in Europe, the quality and avalaibility of fast connections is far worse than USA's. If they hope to replace consoles, they would have to do that worldwide, which is many orders of magnitude more impossible than making the service work decently in America alone.

To add even further to your point, Europe (especially considering, for example, the Netherlands, which has brilliant broadband) pales in comparison to the problems game streaming would run into in Australia. Over here, the average broadband connection speed is 256kbps. That's simply not enough. Even if you doubled that to 512k, which is similarly average here, that's not enough to stream a Youtube video in real time while playing it, so forget game streaming working in full screen, let alone in HD.

The Problem that I see with streaming games are the gamers with friends. I mean would we be able to take our games wherever we go and share them with our friends or would everyone need to buy the game? Now this doesn't go alongside the whole free to play idea but it still poses a problem for the games that will have a starting fee. I just don't want to see the casual gamers downfall because of the move to streaming games. All gamers have had that "Halo" experience where one friend buys the game and then his three friends and him/her stay up all night playing together, I wouldn't want it to destroy that type of interaction because those are some of my favorite gaming experiences.

I stopped playing on consoles the day my Xbox died and can't bring myself to justify buying another console when it is the same price as a car payment. I would sign up for streaming games like the ones talked about here and I think the consoles makers , specifically Nintendo, would eventually use a similar set up to extend the lives of their hardware.

Hardware is sold at a lost for the first year/s or so after launch and as anyone who has gotten a red ring of death can attest, is fraught with potentially embarrassing moments.

We are already streaming movies so I can't see why streaming games would be seen as insane. Right now people are paying sixty dollars US for a piece of plastic with a manual you will never read. Of course some die hards want the night vision goggles so let them pay a fortune to get it but give everyone who is streaming it a discount like paying something like thirty or forty dollars US.

Granted the lag will drive the hard core crowd mad, not because it would really effect the gameplay so much so as it gives them another reason to yell at the monitor.

hmmm..... I don't actually think this will work, but I do hope it mixes things up in the console market, i.e. microsoft sees the onlive service as a threat and begins to offer select games for streaming for all Xbox Live Gold members, so you would actually get something out of paying 50 bucks a year for.

Shh..... quiet. Do you hear that? From the future? That's the sound of all those fanbois screaming because their life's worth is falling apart around them. Aaah, so very sweet.

This would be awesome, yes, but it shouldn't replace the current model entirely. Or otherwise there should be an option to download the stuff to your computer/console/whatever directly, for modding purposes. Although I do see how it would be possible to have the modding part online as well, which would be very handy for mod teams. But in case you're going to be stuck without 'net access for a while (e.g. you're moving to a remote island in the South Pacific or something), the option to download should still be available.

im waiting for failure on this, really. i dont think it's possibly to make streaming 100% lag free in gaming for everyone, because it doesn't just depend on the service, it also depends on your connection as well. there's problems with lag as it is on console, how do they intend on fixing it without one?

also, i like having the physical console & game. it would be convenient for my stuff to be floating on the "cloud computing" concept, but even if they do manage to make a dent in the gaming market against consoles, i dont think it will be the end of consoles "for good"

edit: wouldnt services like OnLive have to get their own games and people to develop for them? i doubt nintendo, sony and M$ are gonna just let them have the titles that keep them going.

Making it work is inevitable, but losing a tangible sense of ownership is a far bigger hurdle. I say "sense of ownership" because it's not just not having discs; direct download has that issue now - but the fact you don't directly own what you access is more painful.

I got a taste of that when I got Steam to get the Secret of Monkey island. Coming from Telltale and Greenhouse, I was stunned Steam was tied to my ability to play. Figuring out offline mode made things better, but my point is the other guys give me what I paid for and stay out of my fun.

If either of them or the big 3 shut down today, I would still have my soft/hard copies of the things I spent money on and (since I'm not into live gaming) they'd work just fine until the device I spent money on died.

zoharknight:Personally i don't see this streaming games only thing working ...Nowadays huge games like GTA 4 or Fallout 3 would take hours just to stream...

I think you misunderstood the technology. The game is not streamed on your machine. It runs on the servers of the provider. The only thing that is streamed is the video output. So, the game logic runs on the server, the graphics are rendered by the server and the result is streamed for you to see, much like a YouTube video. The game would run almost instantly on your screen, without you having to install or download anything.

I'm also a little sceptical about input-lag for realtime games. But even with input lag there would be a market for this. Think of strategy and casual games. With this technology you could continue that game of Civilization IV on your cellphone or run the newest games with the latest graphics on old hardware. All it takes is a display and an internet connection.

I already don't like the idea of digital downloads. People herald it as the killing blow to the evil empire GameStop, and they think that makes it all right, but it ignores the drawbacks:

* You don't own anything. You can't resell it, trade it, borrow it, loan it, rent it, or even give it away.* They may not be around forever. Xbox Live has always bragged about the "delete it, you can always re-download it again at any time forever" feature (as an excuse for their undersized and overpriced hard drives) -- but there are two games (besides Yaris, which by many definitions doesn't even count as a game) that no longer exist on XBLA because of licensing issues.* They require the internet. I don't know about you, but my "always-on" cable internet connection is not 100% stable. If I'm playing a disc-based game in single-player mode, that doesn't matter to me...* The market is fixed. Want to go retro and pick up a copy of Call of Duty 2 on disc on the open market? You can find copies for less than five bucks. (True story.) Want to buy the map packs from the Xbox Marketplace? You'll be paying the original price and end up spending more than the actual game.

Even if they solve all the technical problems around I/O lag, etc., it won't change any of the above.

I'm not a huge fan of digital distribution but if the consoles are heading in the direction they're in now, the console makers know that they can get away with releasing a console at any price they want and gamers will pay it or release a shiny spontaneously combusting brick and gamers will buy it.

If that's what we can expect from future generations of sony & ms products, maybe it's time for the console era to come to an end the same way the arcade era did. If these things work as well as they say, the console will be obsolete.

I don't know about OnLive. While I do like the idea of being able to have access to any game, I'm skeptical about the idea of having only one source for games. Plus I don't think that games that are in the same style as flash games would be able to hold up very well.

transformania:I think the trickiest thing to figure out is the business model. But I'm not a businessman, so I can't contribute any insight.

I do know a lot about tech, though, and it seems that most persons who are skeptical have misconceptions about what would be happening under the hood if this tech actually worked.

(ok, here's the part where I reveal that I've been an IT manager for 8 years but prior to that worked as a game artist, and I teach game art/graphics classes on the side. Oh, and I worked in a graphics research lab for a while too).

Your number crunching is pretty speculative, and contains a lot of "assume that..", but that's okay - this is just a forum. Here's my own simpler take on estimating costs, though:

What existing service most closely matches what OnLive would be like, from an infrastructure standpoint? World of Warcraft comes to mind. WoW currently costs $15/month. Now, consider how much more server horsepower you'd need per customer to handle OnLive. You'd need a more pure processing power - I'd argue it's going to be at least 100 times more (as the amount of CPU you need for WoW is almost nothing).

Bandwidth costs? 720p is around 15-20 Mbps, but that's assuming you can create an algorithm that can compress a real-time game render with the same level of quality & efficiency that you get from encoding a film; even "live" HD broadcasts are delayed at least 2 or 3 seconds, if not more. I don't know if I'm as optimistic as you are about how encoding video from a card would be better than from a video signal - you can't look ahead frames on a game the way you can look ahead frames on video (as you can with a delay).

What does that tell us? Certainly Wow's monthly cost represents the absolute minimum we could expect as gamers. And we don't really know what percentage of their $15 covers operating costs, but the rest of their cost is profit plus software development - something we can expect OnLive to be charging us for as well. Then there's the fact that WoW expects a certain level of utilization from each paying customer. With a wide variety of games to play, I'm certain that the average OnLive customer will be playing it more than the average WoW player.

I just can't see it being very cheap; $3500 a year, as mentioned by another poster, is clearly not realistic, but with WoW currently costing $180/year, I can't see how Onlive could get by with less than $500/year; if 5% of WoW's fee is hardware+bandwidth ($9), 50x$9 = $450 for infrastructure alone, plus a measly $50/year for software infrasture, similar to what MS charges for Live. That still doesn't include any money to pay for the, you know, GAMES, but if it's all going to be free-to-play with money raised by buying microcontent, expect to pay even more.

So the base cost of $500 is equal to cost of a new $500 console every year, with no games included. How is this supposed to be better for gamers? Granted, hardware & bandwidth costs will drop over time, but that applies to console vendors as well.

That, of course, is assuming the pipe dream of a lag-free setup is even possible (I don't see it happening in the next 8 years), and that the system, at launch, will have enough games on it to make a $40/month outlay seem worth it.

Let's get this out of the way... This article was a long fluff-piece, serving almost entirely as a mouthpiece for the people trying to promote their entry into the marketplace. Is it possible that streaming interactive gaming is going to supplant the console and PC markets? Yes. Is it inevitable? Not by a long-shot, even IF the voodun technical wizardry that the OnLive crew have put together actually turns out to work (given that, thus far, the only technical explanations I've heard are Molyneuxesque in their grand intentions and minimal substantiation, along the lines of "We made magical sauce that makes all known technical hurdles vanish!"). I'm surprised there wasn't a shout-out to the Phantom for blazing the trail that OnLive, Gaikai, and Otoy are following...

In drawing references to the music, TV, and Movie markets, the author highlights one of the primary shortcomings of a streaming approach: the inability to archive, back-up, or even pretend to own a license to the content just purchased. I can back-up my MP3s (and strip them of DRM if need be), the same with my movies, and my TV shows, and if I ever give up paper, my eBooks. Streaming games immediately robs me of any sense of ownership, and I don't know that everyone is really ready to give that up. Renting? Absolutely. Look at Watch It Now from Netflix, or Hulu, or Youtube (as mentioned). I don't own that content, but I do pay some sort of entrance fee (Netflix sub, ads on Hulu or Youtube), and in return, I get to watch what I want at a slightly lower quality, but I don't get to keep it. If OnGaiToy is going to displace anything, it's most of the rental market, and a smaller slice of the ownership market.

From what I can gather, there's probably 1 of 2 strategies at play here: 1. Their magic sauce exists, is superconductive at room temperature, is frictionless, and delivers less than 100ms lag consistently. 2. They're playing on the upside of low expectations; promise us the world, in vague, shady ways; leave the majority of us expecting next to nothing; come out with a mediocre product that performs better than the naysayers (though falls far short of their promises); end up with a consumer base that is pleasantly surprised with mediocrity.

Thank you, transformania, for offering the first technical theory that makes me think what they're trying to do is possible, instead of just "we're smarter than the average person trying to stream an interactive experience."

And, yes, finally, no matter how fancy their technology becomes, the state of broadband (and broadband policy) in the US, and from what I can gather, elsewhere, is in no way ready to support yet another industry trying to offload its delivery problems onto it. Bandwidth is not infinite, it is not consistent, and it is not constant. That is going to have to be some awfully magical magic sauce to get over, under, or around those undeniable hurdles.

I can see streaming becoming viable, but not as a complete replacement for traditional console/PC gaming. I know people who buy all their music from iTunes, some who just listen to XM radio and others who will only ever buy CDs. (Contrary to the author's assertion, CDs have *not* "gone away" and I doubt they ever completely will unless a compelling next-gen physical medium is developed.)

Personally, I'm quite happy to pay a subscription fee for instant access to tens of thousands of songs that I'm not sure I'll like (e.g. Rhapsody), but when I find an album on that service that I *do* like, I'll then go out and buy the CD cause I want a high-quality physical copy of it for my archives. I'll subsequently rip it and then never look at the disc again unless I loose the files, but I still want the nicely manufactured original available if I need it- not some crappy CD-R I burned from a digital copy.

The same thing will be true of games. Some people will only buy the physical games. Others will happily buy stuff exclusively through digital distribution and others will gladly pay for a subscription. None of these models need kill any of the others and the industry would be stupid to cut off availability of titles to any of those channels, though there may very well be exclusives.

The consoles are going strong and will only get better as time goes on. I don't expect something like this to even come close to succeeding. Admittedly, I know jack about connections and the like that this stuff would require, but I'm a bit wary of something that is so heavily dependent on internet conncections to deliever thi supposed next generation of game playing. The console has a long, long, long lifespan left in it. It will not go away any time soon.

"With server-side rendering, basically, anything that we put up on that system will work forever."

And if they decide that my favourite game is no longer worth their time hosting... then it will just go?

I play a lot of older games, this has absolutely nothing to offer me.

I'd also second what jmancube said, modding of PC games is great and I would hate to lose that function.

It'd sure as hell make it harder for people to train themselves as game developers, wouldn't it?

Frankly, I like having a bloody disc. I like actually OWNING a physical copy of my game, the same way I do with movies and seasons of my favorite shows. That's less the case with music and other less-than-ten-megabyte things that I can easily download and easily replace, or small games like Spelunky and World of Goo, but there's a reason I download those in their entirety instead of stream them: my internet is crap because I'm using Comcast. The first time my connection hiccups, which it does SEVERAL times a day, WHAM! Say goodbye to my current progress. Autosaving aside, I have to go back and re-play the last hour or so, and that's AFTER going through the trouble of starting the game up again.

What's more, isn't this box of theirs supposed to run on a subscription model? I mean, even if I don't have to pay for the hardware, they do somehow, and that cost is going to come right back to me in some way. I'd just be trading out paying for the hardware upfront for paying for the hardware over the course of a year or so--and it'd probably be more than the hardware's worth after not terribly long given all the other costs it'd take them to maintain these big, constantly-streaming render-farms. And in the end, I'd never actually own the hardware, or the games for it. And don't even get me started on the trouble that comes with depending on their servers. That's the very thing that's more or less killed online play for me and my friends over the last few years.

Loading times will stretch on for eternity and the bandwidth demands would just be.....

Waaaay too soon. Also I don't trust these new guys. They don't seem like they'll be able to handle this kind of massive project. Streaming games isn't happening anytime soon. Let's wait until the average internet speed for the average household gets a big juicy steroid injection. Then we'll talk streaming games.